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Legend of Grimrock

Seeing as there are a fair few of us in the What Are you playing thread chatting about this game, it seems like a dedicated thread is in order. Let this been a place for impressions, criticism and strategies.

Personally, I quite like the game. I never played Dungeon Master or its ilk, and am thoroughly enjoying this modern take. There is one caveat, though: SPIDERS. I have to get past floor 3. I find I have to fight against my RPG/Related Genre tendency of hoarding everything, as there are no merchants that I know of and fairly limited inventory space.

Yeah, it's amazing. I've never played the old dungeon crawlers either though I've always read about them, including walkthroughs at the time - so damn interesting, just never got the chance to play the games. So I've been really loving the chance to finally get involved with the sub-genre, even if with a new game. But yeah, mechanically great, design's good, pretty much everything's great except the GODDAMN SPIDERS ARGH. Well, those and the bug that removes my keybindings for looking left and right every time I quit the game but still. Great game.

Fuck the spiders though, god. First time I've felt freaked out by virtual spiders.

Flint, I would recommend Lands of Lore if you want more of this genre: I got it not long go and as someone who was totally new to the genre it was a good buy. I would recommend following an FAQ for its dungeons, though. Lands of Lore 1&2 are available on GoG so I would grab it at some point.

And as for Grimrock, aside from having the shit unnerved out of me by spiders (enough for me to want to stop playing it for a while) I am really liking it, honestly. It looks stunning, runs really well (although it apparently lacks an FPS cap without vsync on which has a big impact on super-powered computers), doesn't hold your hand and really does a good job of being immersive.

It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so horridly stealthy. The animation is really lively and somewhat creepy on its own, but when your screen suddenly fills with spider legs when yet another one has somehow managed to sneak behind you, the freak-out truly happens. Add to that the fact that they move in hordes...

I'm loving this game even more than I expected to! It's not something to which I can devote hours and hours, but I like to drop in and explore half a floor or so before quitting to come back later. I'm very pleased with the general atmosphere and the animation is really impressive.

But I do have one issue...

Is it possible to hotkey your characters' attacks? Clicking on the item I want to use or repeatedly clicking combinations of spell runes during combat is tiresome. If I could map favorite spells or attacks to my mouse and keys I'd be enormously relieved.

I understand that it may be a design decision to limit this kind of interaction, because it makes combat encounters more challenging, and even more stressful to some degree... but I can't help but feel that I fight the control scheme more often than I do the enemies.

Not officially, but someone on the Something Awful forums is developing an autohotkey script to allow that which can be found here. Bear in mind that his script is for one specific resolution so you may have to do some messing around with it to get it to work properly for you.

I haven't bought this game yet, but how are the puzzles anyway? I usually hate out of context "puzzle" type puzzles in games. If I want to do a rubix cube or a sudoku puzzle I will. And if I want to play a role playing game I will. However, I usually don't like it when my RPG suddenly stops and forces me to do an elaborate logic puzzle before I can advance--especially when the puzzle isn't very well integrated into the the environment.

I haven't bought this game yet, but how are the puzzles anyway? I usually hate out of context "puzzle" type puzzles in games. If I want to do a rubix cube or a sudoku puzzle I will. And if I want to play a role playing game I will. However, I usually don't like it when my RPG suddenly stops and forces me to do an elaborate logic puzzle before I can advance--especially when the puzzle isn't very well integrated into the the environment.

I'd say the puzzles are very good. So far I haven't come across any of the stock puzzles; all the ones so far have been about deciphering cryptic hints or environmental clues, using your wits and skills to advance. They don't explain too much and leave room for the player to actually think, which is great.

The nostalgia for me really set in when the tutorial said - click in the top half of the to throw, the bottom half to drop. Yes, I'd forgotten that this was the way it was. 20 years later, still an intuitive mechanic.

I also love that you can annotate the map. Shameful that for most modern games that's not possible.

"Give all your money to CoD. Give yourself to CoD. Play only CoD. There are no other games. Nothing else matters. Shoot the men. Shoot all the men. Shoot them all the time."